Strategy Savvy: Balanced Strategy Development Approach Using Insights, Culture, Operations, and Digitization

With the COVID-19 pandemic, many business leaders question the need for strategy and the value of strategic planning and management in today’s environment. This book will demonstrate that our approach to strategy development and implementation needs to change to be able to help organizations change. The proposed new approach in this book can provide insights and perspectives to keep strategy relevant by "Putting Strategy in Action" through developing a "Making the Future Happen Today" way of thinking and living.

Many strategy books focus on the perspective of large multinational corporations that have the capacity and capabilities to develop and implement a strategy using very structured methodologies and tools. This book will add a new dimension by focusing on the use of Strategy-as-Practice (SaP), intuition, and serendipity as important complements that can be used by large corporations as well as small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs to develop and implement winning strategies. This is an important dimension to support the strategic decision-making process that is frequently undermined in traditional strategic planning and management-focused books.

The author theorizes that developing into a Strategy Savvy professional is about embracing two of the most important concepts in strategy development—Proactivity and Sustainability. This book addresses the opportunities and threats presented by VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) and how we can capitalize on those opportunities to create unprecedented growth opportunities in Society 5.0 that is shaping new economies, such as the Digital Economy, the Experience Economy, the Sharing Economy, the GIG Economy, the Purpose Economy and the Circular Economy. The author also proposes a new approach to strategy development and implementation that mixes formal planning with practice and intuition that is helped by serendipity. He presents a strategy that is driven by four propellers—insights, culture, operations, and digitization—to ensure arrival at a better future.

Hesham Dinana has over 30 years of working experience in strategy, marketing, information technology, customer care and hi-tech manufacturing. In addition, he has more than 15 years of teaching experience both in undergraduate and graduate degree levels.

His industry experiences include; healthcare, ICT, real estate, food and agribusiness, oil and gas, furniture, and FMCG. Through his various managerial positions at Philips Medical Systems-North America and his consultancy work in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, his experience and expertise evolved to cover a wide spectrum of business and technical areas with hands-on specialization in strategic management, marketing, healthcare planning, corporate governance, IT management and CRM.

Dinana is an assistant professor of integrated marketing communications (IMC) at The American University in Cairo and has taught MBA and DBA courses in strategic and international marketing at Arab Academy for Science and Technology. Dinana has active research agenda in various marketing areas with a focus on digital marketing, entrepreneurship and SME's marketing and the use of the internet-of-things in marketing. He has supervised many MBA theses and DBA dissertations in those areas.

Dinana has given numerous interactive talks/training courses to senior and middle managers and served as a speaker at numerous international conferences focusing on strategic and international management, healthcare marketing, and information technology management especially e-marketing and e-health. As the vice president and regional managing director of a leading international consulting group, his consulting projects' engagement level span from one-on-one executive coaching to national-level strategy development initiatives.

He is a certified management consultant (CMC) by the UK Institute of Management Consultancy; a certified board director by the Egyptian Institute of Directors; a certified balanced scorecard consultant; a certified management simulation trainer and is a member of the American Management Association, Academy of Management, Association for Service Managers, American College of Healthcare Executives, Egyptian Engineers Syndicate and the Egyptian Society for Quality in Healthcare. As an active member of his community, Dinana has served as a board member at the Egyptian Junior Businessmen Association, the Management Consultants Association, and has been advising the Board of Children Cancer Hospital Foundation 57357 and actively leading the development of their projects since 1998.